I am officially so behind on my updates ! Two weekends ago I went to a festival in Osaka with Sachi. The timing was perfect as it was the day after Sports Day.

First amazing thing is that there is a non-stop bus from my town to Osaka. It leaves at 8:30am and arrives at noon.  Meanwhile, taking the bullet train would be half the time but twice the price… Taking a regular speed train would be a similar price and time but require three transfers. To some people transfers are a hassle but in my mind each transfer represents the possibility of stamps!
I was willing to forgo this possibility, however, because the express bus is called the horseshoe crab bus!   And this is Japan, a place where buses shaped like cats and pandas are real. So I held out a secret hope for a horseshoe crab shaped bus… but it was not to be.

One of Sachi’s friends invited us to her home in the Kishiwada area, which is the location of a pretty amazing danjiri festival. A danjiri is a sort of giant wooden house float thing…  It was actually very difficult to properly photograph this event, and somehow I managed to delete the videos I took of it!!!  So I hope these photos will give a sense of how impressive it was.

A danjiri apparently weighs a couple tons. And it probably weighs more with a musical group sitting inside and a man dancing on the top, so it requires all the young and strong people in the town to pull it. All day. Racing through the streets.

The danjiri went down the street in front of the house we were at, but we also watched the live broadcast on a big screen TV.  Her family was huge and many people spoke English, which I appreciated since my Japanese doesn’t exist. We also ate so much delicious food.  I busted out mini peach and grape flavoured kibidango for omiyage–  Okayama represent!

Some neat things about the festival:  Multiple towns (I suppose now they are more like neighborhoods) take part  and they each have their own danjiri and their own signature happi jackets AND t-shirts.  Many of the towns had pretty simple kanji that I was able to read, which became an amusing activity throughout the day.

All the girls wore their hair in corn row braids in a variety of patterns. This looked pretty impressive and also cost an impressive amount of money (not to mention the time to have it done).  I imagined it might be an attempt to rebrand the festival to appeal to young people, apparently the cornrow hairstyle has been part of the tradition for a long time.

At night, the danjiri are fixed up with lanterns.

Finally, like all festivals, there were tons of food and activity booths. I tried a new and amazing food called tamagosenbei. It is basically a fried egg on a giant shrimp cracker with okonomiyaki sauce, tempura flakes, mayo, and whatnot. Totally amazing.

There were also some healthier choices, such as vegetables on sticks.

It was pretty special to see tiny cakes that taste like waffles in the shape of danjiri — then when we got home we found some in the form of Pikachu. Tiny cake festival reenactment!

At the end of the day, I was given some lovely gifts to remember this day: a Great North Town towel (remember the Canada reference?) and a tiny model of a danjiri made by the coworker of one of Sachi’s friends (she works at a technical college that involves woodworking I think)!!!

The next day we hung out in Osaka. First we went to the Museum of Housing and Living, which features a life sized replica of Edo period Osaka on the 8th floor of a building located on the longest shopping street in Japan. Obviously.

There is a kimono rental area inside so most people were dressed up and taking pictures in the old fashioned setting. At the time I wasn’t quite up for this, but I think it would be a great rainy-day activity!  This guy was so into posing so I took a picture too, although it doesn’t show the setting very well.  

A section recreating an old timey school was basically identical to schools today, complete with hooks on the sides of the desks for the students’ bags.

I had been given a mission from a friend to get a costume at Don Quixote, so we headed down to Dotonbori.

For lunch we went to Ajinoya for Okonomiyaka. There was a serious line but in the end we were able to enjoy the finest of okonomiyaki.  In Sachi’s words, the restaurant “isn’t very clean” — it definitely hasn’t been remodelled since the 1970s and all decorations consist of cheap posters of beer– but it is possibly the best okonomiyaki place in Osaka.

Personally I think their secret is the spicy dijon mustard, but you can also buy their house okonomiyaki sauce from the restaurant. Which would make good omiyage. Okonomiyaki omiyage (I think you saw what I did there…).

Before catching the magical horseshoe crab back home I picked up my first omiyage for the staff room. It was very fun to have teachers ask me where I visited. When I told them Kishiwada,  they seemed excited because they knew about the festival. I’m not sure if they were happy I had seen such an impressive thing in Japan or if it was just so exciting to successfully communicate more than one sentence to one another

I hope this post did my Osaka weekend justice and that it was worth the wait!! I will try to be more timely in the future!! Good night….